skin imported mesh
25 messages in this thread
John,
Thanks for the tip. I build lots of animals. The plasticity of the
Animation Master Sculpture module is very good, and I'm sorry to say I find the
Shaper/Lofter process to be a real pain and a time waister, but at least, with
your helpful idea, I can get started. I am doing a CD ROM of Insects, Animals,
and Prehistoric Beasts. It should be done around Christmas. 100 meshes done in
Animation Master, and re-saved as 3DS Meshes. I would like to make most of them
skinable. I wish there was some work around other than spending a day or two
hacking up each dxf, then another day or two setting up heirarchies and naming
slices. Is this the way to the Golden Egg? I was Moooooved by your Cow example.
Thanks, Sanford
Excuse me for jumping in but I'm going to try something today that's related. I
use Multi-Surf for my complex modeling as well as playmation. Multi surf has a
tool to make cross -sections vertically and horizontally and save as dxf, which
could be brought into the shaper and so on. Thanks, -=Mike=-
>>The plasticity of the Animation Master Sculpture module is very good, and I'm
sorry to say I find the Shaper/Lofter process to be a real pain and a time
waister
I'll be interested in seeing how the splinepatch modeller works; for creating
organic shapes I'll have to agree; 3ds isn't the best environment. A college in
tech. pubs. have Animation Master; I may try seeing how it works for my next
dragon head.
>>day or two hacking up each dxf, then another day or two setting up
heirarchies and naming slices
Shouldn't take that long with a little practice; the cow (my first try) took
about 3 hours start to finish. Since skin can use Catmull-Rom splines, which I
believe are the same as those in Playmation, you should be able to get fairly
close to your Playmation model by being careful in your grid placement and
point placement. The best and quickest way to set up a animatable hierarchy
would probably be to follow the example in Bill's branch example and the
soldier/alien meshes (don't know the artist's name); build a substructure to
attach everything to. For example, build a generic four legged sphere and
cylinder skeleton. Save it. Merge a four legged animal mesh (sliced for
skinning; I usually just skin by prefix, and am careful in my naming). Scale
and place the skeleton segments in the correct positions (leg, chest, hips,
head, tail segments, etc.; do this in the editor). Hide the animal and
hierarchically link the skeletion in the keyframer. Unhide the animal, and link
head slices to head skeleton, neck slices to neck skeleton, etc. That way they
can easily animate the skeleton, and when the skeleton is hidden during
rendering the skinned parts should follow along perfectly (if I made a mistake
in my explanation, those who know more about this than me, please jump in and
correct me). After your done with one, save it, reload your base skeleton, and
go on to the next animal.
Oh, and I did see someone in ANIVEND (may be mispelled) who was looking for
Playmation/Animation Master dinosaurs; if that's not you, you may want to leave
a note there, as this person seemed to be looking to buy.
>>I was Moooooved by your Cow example
Run and hide, incoming bad pun ;^)!!!!!!!!!!!!
John Stetzer
JWS
HI, excuse me for barging in a very interesting thread but I may know of a
easier way but it has problems too. I use a modeling program called Multi-surf
and it has some great tools one of them is to make contour lines after you have
an object. In other words it slices the object at whatever increment and sends
out a 2D DXF that can be brought into the shaper where you can adjust and add
vertices so they all have the same vertice count or I suppose you could trace
it using 3d-display and procede with deform fit. But here's the catch, I havn't
been able to figure out how to import a dxf from 3d-studio or Playmation into
it, so it's still a one way street. If someone could figure out how convert a
polymesh dxf into a b-spine type mesh, it would be great. Any ideas?
-=Mike=-
>>Any ideas?
'Fraid not. Maybe someone else will jump in with an idea.
John Stetzer
JWS
Who makes the Animation Master Sculpture module. Is this part of Playmation?
Terry Gilbert
Animation Master is the Pro version of Playmation. $699 from Hash Inc. in
Vancouver, Wa. Sculpture is a module in that program. The $249 playmation
version also export DXF's from its Sculpture module which is the same as the
one in Animation Master. Call (206) 750-0042. Sales, or call a mail order
house. Animation Master has Inverse Kinematics, but none of that will import
into 3DS, only the meshes.
Good Modeling, Sanford
Thanks, Sanford. I'll have to give them a call. I am looking for a spline
editor to use with 3DS.
Terry Gilbert
A.M. is a good one.
Sanford
I enjoyed your article in 3D Artist. I also use Sculpture among other modelers
(theres nothing even close to a single
solution in this area). One thing Ive noticed is that when exporting DXFs from
Sculpture with two different views, like
top and front showing the DXF might not make sense. Ive never had the problem
with both windows on the same view.
Also, although it is a pain to exit DOS after renderings in 3DS that exceed
your memory, its not as bad as you
mentioned in your article. Its not necessary to exit DOS after every frame of
an animation thats rendered continuously.
I guess they all use the same swap file.
Hello Edward,
Glad to see you are a 3D Artist reader. Great magazine! I wrote that
article in the heat of battle with two stubborn 486's and a balky 3DS R3. I am
glad also that you have discovered A.M.'s Sculpture module. True, it doesn't do
everything, but together with 3DS, almost every base is covered.
In regard to your experiences with 3DS, what is the largest files you
have animated? Also, how many and how large were the texture maps you assigned?
The choking and page fault error problems I had are still with me. I never did
finish the Roadrunner animation. Every time I do three test renders (without)
(hiding most of the bird), the redraw speed goes down the ol' toilet. Do you
have a solution to that without re-booting?
Regards, Sanford
Sanford, once you start getting into massive swap situations, the only
reasonable things to do are either get more RAM or simplify your scene. That's
life!
– G
Gary,
my problem is that I plan to do Much more complicated scenes
in the near future. Animal behaviors, insect life, etc. I am trying
to devise a way of using Video Post to composite different scenes of
characters interacting, but I need to be able to import an image from
the first rendered file into the Keyframer, so that I can animate the
second character to interact with it. Any ideas?
In this way, I could assemble very complex scenes. All I need
is to be able to import a color Targa into the Keyframer….Pretty
please?
For now, you're going to have to live with greyscale representations
of your background images in the KF. The future is another thing,
but you're going to have to have patience.
Patience???? Oh, that…. Well, If I know it's on its way some time,
that's a real plus. Hey, I can work with greyscale for now. That will
get the job done.
Hello Sanford The largest file Ive worked on so far is 167000 faces
84000 verts. Its an 1890s Doctor/Dentists office and some objects,
like the dentists chair, are pretty big. I got rid of about one third
of the faces using the Optimize Ipas routine at the angle setting of
2 which is conservative. I cant tell the difference in the look of
the optimized objects when rendered so I didnt need the extra faces.
This file takes about 9 minutes to render and requires about 12MB
more than the 32MB Ive got.
I was really upset when the rendering times went up ( 9, 13, 23,
etc.)This was for single test renderings. When I rendered 20 frames
at once the rendering times held steady at 9 min. So my conclusion is
that the swap file limitation is a pain and customers of Pharlap like
Autodesk should pressure them to improve their product. On the other
hand, once testing is done and continuous rendering begins, I havnt
had a problem (yet). I have complained and was told that it isnt a
3DS problem but a Pharlap design limitation.
Besides Optimize Ive tried to keep file size down by substituting
maps for geometry when possible. For example, in this doctors office
a map of microscopes and bottles could be in the glass doored shelves
rather than objects. I make different resolutions of the same maps
and use the small ones for video and the large ones (up to 3 to 8MB)
for Iris print output. I also figured out how to make seamless maps
for tiling in Photoshop, which saves space. Theres a good description
of seamless tile making in the Fractal Painter companion which would
have saved me some time if I had read it first.
Eventually I'll get another computer and make sure it will hold
128MB of RAM. Of course, I used to think 32MB was a fair amount.
Regards, Ed
I agree that Phar Lap should be fixed or abandoned. Is it really the only game
in town? This limitation on scene size is the one thing that really upsets me
about 3D Studio.
I just finished a render of a spider and wasp fighting. I tried to make
a 640 X 480 flic and my system went along fine for 120 frames, then did a
memory protection fault error and locked. Yet, when I render individual targas,
it will continue on through 600 frames. I ended up rendering 756X486 to targas,
and laying off to Beta Tape. There is a lot of continuous motion, and each
frame was 22 minutes to render. That's 220 hours for 20 seconds of finished
animation!
I think we're still in the wood with the current speed of our computers
and the rendering of 3DS.
Sanford PS: Good luck with your work. Try doing glass
furniture with vapor rising from a cup of coffee and a few plants, with two
people in clothing sitting at the table. How long do you suppose that would
take to render?
Sanford,
<< I agree that Phar Lap should be fixed or abandoned. Is it really the only
game in town? >>
Sorry but yes..
<< just finished a render of a spider and wasp fighting. I tried to make a 640
X 480 flic and my system went along fine for 120 frames >>
Are you using HIGH pallete mode or Medium or Custom? Medium or Custom is the
prefered way..
I can't recall on the flic, but I did use Custom pallete on the 600 Targas that
I rendered. I just rendered one frame from the middle, and used that as the
reference GIF frame. Worked fine. The flic problem seems to come and go but it
is less troublesome since I got 20 megs of ram. My 8 meg machine is hopeless.
Ram is what I want for Christmas, Santa!
Regards, Sanford
Sanford,
>>I agree that Phar Lap should be fixed or abandoned. Is it really the only
game in town? This limitation on scene size is the one thing that really
upsets me about 3D Studio.
<<
What limitation on scene size do you mean? Large files that will not fit in
RAM _will_ page to disk and yes this is slower than RAM. That is not a
Pharlap problem, that is just the nature of RAM vs disk storage. It is
unfortunate that Pharlap does not have the ability to switch back to RAM-only
addressing after you have forced the system into swap mode addressing. However
this is really not a problem for animation, since the next frame rendered will
switch back to swap mode anyway. It is only a problem when you are
interactively rendering. In that case you should keep two copies of your
texture maps in different directories. One normal res and one _very_ low res
for test renders. Then just change the map paths depending on which type of
rendering you are doing. On most models it is the texture maps that cause the
model to exceed RAM, though it sounds like your models are biased more towards
complex geometry.
Have you tried Optimize?
>>The flic problem seems to come and go but it is less troublesome since I got
20 megs of ram. My 8 meg machine is hopeless.<<
I haven't had that particular problem with FLIC rendering, but 8 MB is not much
RAM for rendering. We use 32MB as a minimum production spec. Strange things
sometimes happen when you are crammed into such a small amount of RAM. Also, I
don't suppose that virtual RAM is as stable as real RAM. I don't know, but I
would guess that rendering FLICs probably takes more RAM than rendering to
individual frames.
Terry Gilbert
Forcade & Associates
Yes, I do have ier. The foot goes from 1289 to 1057 vertices. Maybe I'm getting senile
(g) The one thing I have noticed is that if you plan to push and pull vertices
later, optimize disorganizes the mesh to an alarming degree. The pretty
horizontal rows of the DXF contours become a crazy quilt. Looks like I will
have to do my face deforming before I run optimize and then I don't know if the
objects will morph corectly when I'm done. I'll find out tonight.
Regards, Sanford
Sanford, If you're rendering 24bit .TGA's using a custom palette isn't going to
gain you a thing since it's not used at all. Palettes are only for 256 color
images… When rendering flics, you should use either medium or customDESK] 73172,1351
Hi Andrew,
<< but I just reentered 3DS3, tried it again, and there was no recurrence of
the problem. >>
Please, if this happens again, keike
Hi David,
I have to look into the "every 10th frame" method. I'm sure there are
ways I could improve things. I do have some example animations. The Tarantula
fighting Wasp is on tape, VHS. If you are really interested, I can send you a
copy. I was trying to get it done for this year's Siggraph, but I got bogged
down in fixes and render problems. I still don't have my own PAR of
.. 18 apendages and four wings plus bodies are loads of fun to coordinate.
Send me your address on Email, and I mail you a tape.
Regards, Sanford
I too learned much from your article and hope there will be more to come. I
did want to take this opportunity to mention that I use Os2 4 Windows and
though it's a pain in alot of ways, I have never experienced a paging problem,
it just never occurs in os2. Keep up the good work. -=MIKE=-
Glad you liked the article. The Roadrunner is still not animated beyone a few
frames. I am waiting for a new Pentium. I have a copy of OS2 but I havn't
loaded it yet. I will try it soon. I have a future city file that is much
larger than the Roadrunner. Lost of buildings. A fly through is impossible with
my current ram and 486-66. So I'm doing Bats. Then will come a Pterodactyl.
Lost of fun.
Sanford